Idealogue

As within, so without (Part I) – The purpose in purposeful design

Founded based on the belief in purposeful design, our primary motivation has always been about designing things of values and meaning from day one.

Despite that, the world that we know whirl and whiz in front of us every day. Many of us are clueless and helpless in trying to grasp the reality of the now and the shifting mentality of the people. Like building a sand castle on the beach that gets wash away by the next wave, we soon realised that what we knew yesterday brings little values today.

People’s perspective can be varied. Communication can be exclusive, and design output can be subjective. Society’s values and meanings are also continually reshaping. The variance of these contributing factors is too vast and ambiguous to formulate definitively. The rules of the game are ever changing.

While trying to make sense from all these variables feels like catching water with your bare hands, we are unable to grasp whatsoever no matter how hard we tried.

As our conscious mind, so the conscious world

While there are many things in life that we do not have complete and total control over, but the one thing we do have total and complete control over is our thinking. Despite what is happening out there, we have the liberty to choose how we wish to address and communicate with it. However, we do have to recognise the fact that we are all human beings to begin with. Our analysis, interpretation and viewpoints can be at the time, be incomplete and misrepresented due to following mental huddles:

Are we holding onto some proven but outdated perspective too dearly that we are reluctant to take any new risk?

Are we merely doing hear-sake but never truly comprehend the subject clearly?

Do we feel threatened by radical viewpoints that we felt morally compromise or intellectually humiliate?

Are we only cherry-picking the fragments that we favour in order to sell our version of the world based on our personal biases?

Let’s framed it this way; are we truly open or are we deceiving ourselves by thinking we are ‘open'?

The degree of our perceived ‘openness’ determined how we 'impressionalise' this world outside. Strangely enough, our mind is capable of making up these parallelisms. One of the reasons why it is behaving in this manner is because human beings tend to contextualise something that is unknown to us using merely our finite knowing, manipulating further under the influence of our pride and prejudice. Hence, this perceived subject takes form based on those selective fragments. Take this casual remark for example: "The new Sale Manager must be a very smart guy… he recently just graduated from this top business school in US…” Although not entirely baseless(The school could be legit for that), but our immediate reaction to pre-conceive that this guy is smart without verification(also depending on how we defined ’smart’) and start linking things up senselessly can result in a sketchy and perhaps biases conclusion.

It is a conviction that gives immediate closure to the subject without exploring the possibilities of else ways. A rather straightforward and convenient thought process that leads us to a cogitative dead end.